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> Anybody that goes around playing
> the same old material over and over, year in, year out, and never
> comes up with anything new to say, is just embarrassing themselves,
> IMHO, and no longer artistically relevant.
I have to disagree with you here and respectfully ask you to get off
your high horse. Live music performance is like being a professional
athlete. Musicians and athletes are in the unique position of
getting to do something that they love with very little
responsibility and whether or not they continue doing it is decided
by only two things. The first is if they still like to do it and the
other is if people still pay them to do it. As long as those two
criteria are met they should do it as long as they can because few
other jobs short of winning the lottery pay so much while requiring
so little.
Additionally, artistic relevance is, well, irrelevant. There are
plenty of groups that are paid quite well for doing nothing but
covers of songs that were "relevant" decades ago. Where I live a
Beatles cover band filled a 2000 seat auditorium at $25-50 a ticket
to play songs that were released in the decade before I was even
born. They can do that two nights a month and make more money apiece
annually than 99.9% of the population. Should they stop playing
because their music is no longer artistically relevant? The only
responsibility an artist has if he wants to get paid is to play music
people want to hear. If people are tired of hearing the old stuff
they'll stop paying.
No musician who takes playing seriously would not give a great deal
to be able to say that when they were 60+ years old they could still
pack clubs with people who wanted to hear them play.
